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Jeff Passan, ESPNOct 10, 2024, 12:29 PM ET
- ESPN MLB insider
Author of “The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports”
The Minnesota Twins announced Thursday that they are for sale, potentially ending one of the longest-tenured ownerships in Major League Baseball.
The Pohlad family, which bought the Twins for $44 million in 1984, said it has retained Allen & Company, the investment banker that commonly facilitates sales of sports franchises. The Twins are estimated to be worth between $1.5 billion and $2 billion.
“After months of thoughtful consideration, our family reached a decision this summer to explore selling the Twins,” the team said in a statement. “As we enter the next phase of this process, the time is right to make this decision public.”
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Since moving to Minnesota from Washington, D.C., in 1961, the Twins have been owned only by Calvin Griffith and the Pohlads, whose patriarch, Carl, purchased the team and passed it to his son Jim. It is currently controlled by his grandson Joe.
Only the New York Yankees, Chicago White Sox and Philadelphia Phillies have been under the same ownership for longer than the Twins.
The Pohlads found great success early in their tenure, winning the World Series in 1987 and 1991. By 2001, though, MLB was threatening to contract them and the Montreal Expos because of financial troubles in the sport — a spurious plan that eventually faded.
While the Twins have found regular-season success this century — they’ve made the postseason 10 times in 25 tries — they haven’t advanced past the division series since 2002 and are coming off a disappointing 82-80 season during which a 9-18 collapse in September kept them from the postseason.
The most recent sale of an MLB team — the Baltimore Orioles to David Rubenstein over the summer — was valued at $1.725 billion. Prior to that, the last sale had been Steve Cohen’s $2.4 billion purchase of the New York Mets in 2020.
The Los Angeles Angels and Washington Nationals have explored sales in recent years but pulled their teams off the market. The collapse of a majority of the regional sports networks that have injected billions of dollars into the industry annually has fomented financial uncertainty within the sport. The Twins are among the teams that have been affected, and it was announced this week that MLB would produce and broadcast Twins games next season.
